Vertiflite May/June 2021

Lilium believes its design will readily scale from its 7-Seater to a 16-Seater design, much better than a generic four-passenger open-rotor design.

There were two small-scale models, Gleiter and Hexa, followed by two larger sub-scale prototypes: the fifth-scale Dragon and half- scale Falcon. The earliest operational concepts had two sets of pivoting, retractable canards, as well as folding wings to fit in a parking space. Lilium’s third-generation Eagle was a full-scale unmanned demonstrator sized for four seats, which conducted a series of unmanned test flights in April 2017. Following a relatively abbreviated flight test program, Lilium moved forward with a five-seat model, announcing it in 2018 as its production model, with room for a pilot and four passengers. The five-seater, recently revealed its name as “Phoenix,” has 36 “electric engines” — fans embedded in the flaps of the forward and aft wings — ganged in sets of three fans, each vectoring independently for control in hover, transition and cruise. Two aircraft were built. On May 16, 2019, Lilium announced the first flight of its first untethered, unmanned five-seater, which had taken place on May 4, 2019, after extensive ground testing. A Lilium press release and video in October 2019 showed the aircraft flying in partial wingborne flight, “flying at speeds in excess of 100 km/h” or 62 mph. The February 2020 fire and the COVID-19 lockdown and restrictions, precluded any further work on the second Phoenix demonstrator, but it has been completed and fitted with improvements. Wiegand explained in an interview, “when the fire occurred was when we reassembled the battery pack to resume the second part of the flight test campaign. And then we had the fire, we had the shops closed for 6–8 weeks because of all the cleaning in the buildings. And

The four-seat Lilium “Eagle” technology demonstrator first flew in April 2017.

May / June 2021

The five-seat Lilium “Phoenix” demonstrator first flew in May 2019.

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